Eric S. Raymond wrote on Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 19:26:15 -0500: > Stephen Butler <sbut...@elego.de>: > >[various observations, ending with...] > > There's also the phenomenon of "evil twins", where an item is replaced > > when it should have been changed. Arbitrarily breaking the flow > > causes problems because the replace-operation is echoed on branches > > by 'svn merge'. > > I think these are issues that should be documented somewhere *other* > than the stream format description. What the dumpfile document should > describe is how the stream defines actions on an abstract filestore; > the semantics of flows and how the client tools work is a different > level of description. >
Indeed. Note that much of the discussion above has been about the semantics of various operations on the Subversion filesystem, more than about dumpfiles. It should be possible to have one document describing the semantics of the Subversion filesystem (svn_fs.h) and another describing how to parse dumpfiles; perhaps viewing them as serializations of a series of svn_delta_editor_t drives.